Tell Me About Your Non-Murder Content

Looking through our list of MMO links, A Tale in the Desert is the only one I see that does not advertise “killing things” as one of its primary gameplay features. Then again, I have Civilization on my desktop, in which genocide is a path to victory.

Need for Speed: World, there we go. Good catch. Granted, there is some population that would not watch racing without the potential for high speed crashes, but it’s not an advertised feature of being a racer.

Puzzle Pirates will not phrase it as murder on the high seas, but it’s kind of what pirates do, and they do advertise sword fights and cannonballs. Are those exclusively anti-monster these days?

While ATItD enjoys animal husbandry, I would not go so far as to say that the slaughter of sheep is a selling point.

For Puzzle Pirates, I never quite got the “killing” vibe even during swordfighting and rumble sequences against other pirates and brigands.The kid-friendly cartoon aspect rather implied “knocking out” and “defeating” (in the superhero sense.)

The most illegal thing I could accuse it of is that pillaging aka stealing is okay. And ships are sunk here and there, I guess, which may lead to incidental death by extrapolation, but certainly corpses not shown or stressed.

However, they do have Sea Monster Hunts that are one aspect of its endgame, and those I don’t imagine they whack unconscious via cannonballs and ramming.

Funny thing though even though I consider myself a fairly gentle person in real life almost all the games I enjoy are violent. I have never really analysed it but I guess that for men anyway it is a testosterone thing. Perhaps video games, just like sport, are a safe outlet for our murderous urges.

Guild Wars 2? I feel queasy everytime I have to kill someone in this game. Well, killing fiery monsters for defense purpose feels okay, and maybe one or the other human who went over to the dark side. That said, it is fully possible to avoid PvP content in this game (which I do) without losing any fun. I am out roaming the maps and enjoying this massive universe, making a ball avoiding as many foes as possible. :-)

In Guild Wars 2, I rarely feel like I’m killing anything. A fundamental rule of that game seems to be that defeated opponents and allies could theoretically be revived if they’re ever knocked out. PvP seems a lot less damaging from that point of view.

There once was such an MMO: Uru, aka Myst Online. The first publisher, Ubisoft, shut it down before it got out of open beta because it failed to attract a sufficient number of players. However, it has an intensely-loyal core fanbase and a committed developer, so it actually made a comeback with a new publisher. That time it survived for a year before being shut down for a lack of players. Yet the fanbase and the developers still refuse to let it die, so it still exists on life support via a server run by Cyan Worlds.

Interestingly, the premise of the game is very much akin to GW2’s “living story” idea. The story was meant to slowly evolve and change the game world over time.

Now that I think of it, what’s even more interesting is during the second publisher era, it shifted to something more like what GW2 did with Halloween/Lost Shores/Wintersday. A week a month was designated the “episode,” which would have story events along with any major content releases for the month. They didn’t get to the point of telling players in advance when any one-shot things were happening, but people didn’t feel like they had to be present at every such thing.